It might come as a surprise but adoption of Internet of Things platforms is growing fastest in the travel industry as airports track passengers and luggage, airlines monitor aircraft maintenance and real-time vitals and the hospitality industry pushes to personalized guest content and keyless room entry. And yet they still can’t make hotel WiFi fast enough to stream Netflix… Right on cue, Microsoft is transforming itself into a cloud-services company with impressive revenue growth. That’s a good thing because its mobile hardware business just recorded a 57% decline in sales and now has less than 2% market share … What is the best artificially intelligent smartphone agent? Well, it’s not Microsoft’s Cortana … Bloomberg is reporting Apple may bring new wireless charging, similar to Wi-Fi, to the 2017 iPhone. The idea is not exactly new; it was actually discovered 100 years ago by Nikola Tesla. … Separately, Apple said the plugs on many existing wall-chargers may cause fires … Strength in Sony’s media business, which produced the latest Bond film, Spectre, is off-setting weakness in image-sensor sales to premium smartphone makers Samsung and Apple. How strange is it the actor who plays James Bond, Daniel Craig doesn’t like Sony smartphones because he feels they’re not premium like Samsungs and iPhones … With the first votes cast in Iowa and the political season officially underway, Facebook looks to be the big winner. Apparently the social network has a treasure trove of user data campaign political scientists (and advertisers) just can’t get enough of… The first driverless bus to hit the streets in the Netherlands is the WePod, an all electric six passenger vehicle with a top speed of just 5 m.p.h. At least passengers don’t have to worry about high speed collisions… One noted futurist believes humans will voluntarily merge with machines as soon as 2050 in the quest for immortality. This future race, Homo Optimus, will see all of our thoughts and experiences stored online for future generations. The futurist argues anyone under the age of 40 today will have a good chance of electronic immortality, meaning they could essentially upload their personality to the cloud so it can continue posting after their death

Drones: Google wants to use autonomous solar powered drones, above, with new millimeter wave radio transmitters to beam data back to Earth 40 times faster than current broadband. Read at The Guardian here

Contactless Payments: Bank of America is going to allow customers to start making transactions at their ATM’s using no more than their smartphones. Read at The Charlotte Observer here

Mobility as a Service: Lyft and a number of other ride-hailing firms will soon integrate Google’s Waze artificially intelligent routing software into their own smartphone applications. Read at Techcrunch here

Self-Driving Cars: In a move that could be the first step to full autonomy, Volvo is making available self-braking systems that virtually eliminate the possibility of rear-end collisions. Read at The Verge here

Autonomous Vehicles: The US Army already has autonomous trucks and the fully autonomous helicopters it plans to use to transport them into combat zones. Read at Popular Science here

Internet of Things: General Motors’ new plant at Lake Orion is getting a cloud-based “mother brain” IoT platform to coordinate 800 robots working on the factory floor. Read at Fortune here